Ribeiro-Pereira, Miguel2018-01-232018-01-232016RIBEIRO-PEREIRA, Miguel - Major/Minor Harmony and Modern Consciousness: An Anthroposophical and Musical Approach to Laughing and Weeping. In I Congresso Lusófono sobre Esoterismo Ocidental, Lisboa, Portugal, 7-10 Maio, 2016. – In FREITAS, Rui Lomelino de (ed.) - Actas/Anais I Congresso Lusófono Esoterismo Ocidental. Vol.1: Arte e esoterismo ocidentar. Lisboa: Universidade Lusófona, 2016. ISBN 978-989-757-048-3. p. 196-2099789897570483http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/23942The subject of this brief essay is the polarity of laughing and weeping as the expression of a person’s inner spiritual life. It will be first described according to the anthroposophical perspective developed by Rudolf Steiner (1910). Then I shall focus on three crucial moments of both cultural modernity and musical aesthetics: the humanist impulse of the Renaissance; the scientific impulse of the Baroque; the spiritual impulse of the Romanticism. A picture of tonal music will thereby be given as an archetypal manifestation of the modern subject—in growing conflict and ever more selfconscious— based on the fundamental significance of the third-interval, a novel kind of harmony poised to embrace opposed but complementary poles. An analysis of Schubert’ well-known song Lachen und weinen (D. 777), setting a poem by Friedrich Rückert to music, will round off the whole.engAnthroposophyLaughing/ weepingMajor/ minor harmonyModern consciousnessconference object